Let’s talk about cinema

Netflix and Amazon have replaced conventional film festival and movie club screenings as gateways for watching gripping documentaries. But, festivals still play a key role in holding on to the innate spirit of cinema, which is a sense of the collective, believes Chennai-based Amudhan Pushpalingam, award-winning documentary filmmaker. His film collective, Marupakkam, and Goethe Institut are collaborating for the 6th Chennai International Documentary and Short Film Festival.

The festival will screen around 40 documentaries and 10 shorts, curated by film critics, scholars and filmmakers from across the country. A package on films by artists throws interesting light on how painters and sculptors approach the medium of cinema. CS Venkiteswaran, film critic and documentary filmmaker, curates this session. “These packages are usually shown in art festivals or biennales. The idea here is to make the artists interact with laymen, who have no nuanced understanding of paintings. It is going to be an interesting interaction,” feels Pushpalingam.

One segment pays homage to veterans such as S Sukhdev, an accomplished filmmaker of the 1950s and 1960s.

“He is one of the superstars of the Indian documentary scene. He used to make films for the Films Division (FD). When we were students, we thought FD’s films were forced on us, so we hated them. However, when we look back now, these were some of the best works of the Indian documentary scene. During this period, the Indian Government pumped enough money and showed these films in halls,” explains Pushpalingam.

Sukhdev is an interesting filmmaker and a person, because his character had shades of grey. “For instance, people suspected him to have supported the Emergency. Still, one has to admit that he made important films. He was commissioned to make a film on India’s 20th Independence Day, but he made a critical film. It is no surprise that film officials never liked him,” he says. There are also contemporary documentaries, like Many Months in Mirya, a four-hour-long documentary, set in Ratnagiri district in Maharashtra. “These films are rarely showcased in conventional festivals because they cannot afford to allocate that much time. I saw this film at the SiGNS festival in Kerala when I was part of the jury.”

A package called Paradigm Non-shift, curated by film scholar and historian Amrit Gangar, zooms in on the films of Robert Bresson, Amit Dutta and Mani Kaul, examining the continuum in the works of the trio. Pushpalingam will be curating an international and Indian package. There is also a category dedicated to Tamil documentaries.

After ever screening, the audience will be given 20 minutes to interact with filmmakers. These live interactions set a festival apart from the experience of watching films online, points out Pushpalingam. “I’m also a fan of Netflix. I just strongly believe that cinema is a public medium and that the possibility of a discussion post screening should be explored.”

The festival is on from April 15 to 19 at Goethe Institut, Nungambakkam. For details of the festival schedule, visit chennaifilmfestival.blogspot.in